Is this item a 1959 Houston Buffs jersey? Or is it some other team – or even a later made retro jersey in honor of some team from 1959?
Our “New Jersey Mystery” here at The Pecan Park Eagle lacks the romance and intrigue that remains to this day around the question – “Whatever happened to the body of Jimmy Hoffa?” – but it also holds the promise of an accomplishable certain answer – one that is far less likely anytime soon, if ever, in the older, far more famous case.
In fact, as plotted in our headline, but misdirected in our first paragraph here for the sake of pun-level comparison to the Hoffa case, ours is a “new” jersey mystery – and not a “New Jersey” mystery. Even more truly stated, we could say that what we have here is – not “failure to communicate” on the level of “Col Hand Luke”, – but a “new mystery” about another “old jersey” that has come to our Houston baseball community’s attention in need of accurate identification.
The Eagle got involved exactly one month ago as one of the recipients of this e-mail appeal from friend and fellow SABR colleague, Bob Dorrill, who also happens to be our Larry Dierker Chapter leader and a man who cares deeply about the way we treat real artifacts of the game’s history. In reference to the jersey featured at the top of today’s article, Bob had written the following in his general e-mail of 2/15/15:
A local friend of mine who sells baseball jerseys came upon the flannel in the photo below which was issued by Rawlings in i959 and has an old English letter “H” on the front and number 9 on the back. My friend thinks it is a Buffs jersey.
If I recall properly Hall of Fame flannels were only issued to Hall of Famers and only after they had been elected to the Hall.. Perhaps the jersey was worn at an old timers game here. Do you have any idea of who might have worn this jersey, what team he played and in what year?
The Buffs did wear a uniform with the Old English “H” in the early 1940’s (a photo of Danny Murtaugh in “Houston Baseball The Early Years” shows the letter) but the uniform does not have pin stripes. He also was not in the HOF in 1959.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
What’s Happened Since 2/15/15?
Not much and quite a bit:
(1) Rule out Danny Murtaugh’s appearance in such a jersey for all of the reasons that Bob Dorrill suggested in his appeal for help. The old “H” uniforms of Murtaugh’s early Buffs career did not have pinstripes – and Murtaugh never played or managed the 1959 Buffs – nor did he ever find himself inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1959, or any other year since, and then had such a jersey created in his memory.
(2) The following two detailed photos have suggested to my own memory that the 1959 Houston Buffs may have worn this jersey (dark pin stripes and the Olde English “H” on the left breast jersey pate. It was the Buffs’ first season in AAA ball, and more importantly, their first year of independence in decades from the red-dominant color theme of their St. Louis Cardinal overseers. I still recall walking into Buff Stadium in 1959 and being immediately taken aback by the absence of red and the presence of pinstripes and – I’m almost certain, but have no photos to prove it, the imprint of that Old English “H” on the left side of the jersey chest.
The use of “Hall of Fame” by Rawlings makes this item seem more like a “long-after-1959” commercial retail store retro jersey. We would probably find all we need to know from the company.
This tag on the jersey is what leads me to believe that it could be either a 1959 Houston Buffs jersey or some kind of retro jersey made to commemorate some “H” team from that year.
My memory is pretty good about this sort of thing, but it’s not proof and I don’t trust it for another reason in 1959, By this time, I was in my junior to senior years at Uh taking 15 hours per semester, 12 semester hours in the summer, and also working 40 hours a week, first in clothing sales downtown and then in water and parking meter sales for Rockwell Manufacturing. I saw fewer games and had less time to watch baseball or play baseball in 1959-60 than at any other time in my life. We need to find a photo of the 1959 Houston Buffs that is accurately cataloged. Perhaps, Joel Draut, the photo archivist for the Julia Ideson Library Collection downtown can be of help.
When I say “accurately cataloged”, I especially mean “watch out for what you pull up on Google. Today I found the following image on Goggle identified as the “1928 Houston Buffs”. For a lot of reasons that should jump right out at anyone who has followed the Buffs or been in Houston long enough to know the difference between our weather in January and our weather in August, this picture clearly wasn’t taken in 1928, For one thing, Houston was still playing in the stone age of segregated baseball back in 1928, but there are other give away features of error that show up that mistake pretty quickly upon inspection.
This photo is misidentified on Google as the 1928 Houston Buffs. – It could be either the 1960 or 1961 Houston Buffs. I’m not sure.
We’ve since met the collector who owns this jersey and whose passion for this sort of thing has launched this search. Since I don’t know if he wants to go public here, I will leave it up to him to either drop me an e-mail or post his own comment on this article. In the meanwhile, if any of you have any ideas, we would appreciate receiving them as public comments here on this article too at The Pecan Park Eagle website.
Thank You, Bill McCurdy, Publisher and Editor, The Pecan Park Eagle
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
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